1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to electronic distribution of digital goods. More particularly, the invention relates to movement of digital goods from a vendor to an electronic distribution system.
2. Technical Background
Digital delivery has emerged as an efficient and profitable method of distributing digital goods, such as software. While some vendors of digital goods offer simple downloads from their Web sites, these services provide only limited value to the vendor and the vendor's customers. There is a growing demand from end-users for increased services and from vendors for better management and control of the complete delivery process.
J. Brentano, T. Pieper, P. Martinelli, B. Thompson, Method and system for managing digital goods, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/635,840 (Aug. 5, 2003) provide a portal from which a vendor of digital goods distributes its goods to its customer base. Images of the goods to be distributed are associated with metadata that model the often complex relationships among the digital goods. The goods reside on a central repository and are then made available to entitled accounts. While the images from which copies of the goods are made can be provided to the portal by the vendor individually, it would be desirable to automate the process fully, providing a special advantage to vendors of enterprise software, for example, who may have very large numbers of files or files of very large size that must be uploaded in short periods of time. The prior art provides a number of examples of moving data from one machine or application to another.
W. Rodriguez, J. Barnett, S. Marks, System, method and computer program product for a catalog feature in a supply chain management framework, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0050859, filed Mar. 23, 2001; and the related application G. Hoffman, A. Menninger, M. Burke, System, method and computer program product for an entertainment media supply chain management framework, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0074249, filed Mar. 13, 2001 describe an infrastructure for supply chain management. Supply chain participants send raw supply chain data to a central data warehouse. The data are formatted and republished to the participants as reports; for example, materials cost reports, or sales/cost comparisons. Additionally, participants in the supply chain can order goods from each other.
While Rodriguez, et al. and Burke, et al. provide a platform for participants to share data so that they can plan and forecast collaboratively, they do not consider the problem of efficiently moving digital goods in bulk and reliably associating the digital goods with correct metadata at their destination.
A. Rivlin, Apparatus and method for annotated bulk copying of files to a database, U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,159 (Feb. 29, 2000) describes an apparatus and method for tracking the transfer status of individual files being copied in bulk from one application to another. While transfer status of individual files is monitored, no solution is proposed for reliably associating the transferred files with the correct metadata, or for verifying that the correct file was transferred and was not corrupted in transit.
K. Rosensteel, K. Allen, W. Lawrance, Method and data processing system providing bulk record memory transfers across multiple heterogeneous computer systems, U.S. Pat. No. 6,615,217 (Sep. 2, 2003), describe a means whereby bulk data is written by an application on a first computer to a file on a second heterogeneous computer system. Jobs or tasks are started from one system to execute on the second system with the results being returned to the first system. The system described does not contemplate distribution of digital goods by a vendor to its customer base. Additionally, no solution is proposed for reliably associating the transferred files with the correct metadata, or for verifying that the correct file was transferred and was not corrupted in transit.
J. Daka, A. Waters, A High Performance Broadcast File Transfer Protocol, Computer Communication Review 18, 274-81 (No. 4, 1988) and N. Pesce, Bell of Pennsylvania Bulk File Transfer Project, in Interface '87 Proceedings 40-47 (1987) describe different implementations of bulk data transfer.
None of the systems described above contemplate transfer of digital goods to a central repository by a vendor or distribution of the goods by a vendor to its customer base. Furthermore, no solutions to the challenge of providing an automated method that reliably links file images with the correct product metadata or of verifying that the file image was not damaged or corrupted in transit are offered.
It would therefore be a significant technological advance to automate the process of delivering digital goods to an electronic delivery service, thus providing an easier, more reliable way for a suppler to add goods to the service. More particularly, it would be advantageous to facilitate provision of digital images and reliably linking the images with the corresponding metadata while verifying that the image is correct, and has not been compromised in transit.